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Show PARCHMENT I was reading ancient Greek history the other night, with a small text and a big unabridged dictionary dic-tionary alongside to look up what was read. Being in the printing business I thought I knew the word "parchment" and all it meant; why yes of course, "an animal skin" the sheepskin we get on graduation; and by association, any fine quality, high grade paper, so well made as to embody those characteristics of superior quality, fine texture, and longevity which inmitate to a high degree the original orig-inal "parchment", or actual skin of an animal. The dictionary helped but the text gave life to the dictionary, and explained the word as I had never seen before. Here is what the text said: Athens was the cultural center of the European world; when Alexander conquered Athens, he colonized col-onized Egypt with Greeks, and founded the great city of Alexandria, and richly endowed its library with magnificent funds, and that library rose to the envious status of having 700,000 volums, at that time consisting almost wholly of beaten rolls of "papyrus" (paper as now familiar to us, made practically prac-tically the same way). Another city, Pergamus, was a rival of Alexandria, Alexan-dria, and itself, too, would emulate the great library with one of its own, if possible, equally as vast. But Ptolemy, ruler of Egypt saw so much papyrus pap-yrus being exported to Pergamus, that he feared a shortage, and, of course, he wished to keep down the competing library, so he issued an edict that no more papyrus plant (or its manufactured product) should be exported to Pergamus. So the ruler of Pergamus, peeved at this high-handed discrimination discrimina-tion against him, striped the hides off young sheep, young calves, and developed the manufacture of a material to take the place of "papyrus," which in some respects was even better than the product at Alexandria. So well did he do it that his product, in honor, was named after the city of Pergamus, and was called "Pergamena." Later the vowel got changed to "Pargamena," and still later, when our forebears came into the picture, usage became "parchmena," "parchment"! How interesting. So now when son or daughter get their "parchment" "parch-ment" roll (diploma we now say) from the high school or college, we can look at it closely and see ancient history of about 280 B. C., when rival cities, proud of a library as denoting a cultural apex marking worth, fought bitterly for supremacy, and the loss of that struggle giving the world (as often losers do) a great value, a lasting article, filling a need. 1 Down the centuries roll human achievements; today we print a good Bible (Byblus, book) on "Parchamena", not on papyrus (the Egyptian plant) but from cleaned rags, silks, old shirts, and other articles, and call the "paper" we so got in that process of manufacture, by the trade name (among printers) of "parchment" "Parchamena" changed by usage of foreign tongues. Thousand of years ago, an Egyptian slave cut a papyrus plant into sections, beat and pounded those sections into flats, merged into a continuous roll, and got as a finished product, 1 papyrus " paper; pa-per; the ancient Maya did the same with agave leaf, or, he also actually used a skin and wrote on either; today we saw a pine tree into chips, boil it in a vat with sulphuric acid, and call the product a wood sulphate "paper" or for short Hammermill Bond. But when we get into the class of a "Pergamena" "Perga-mena" or "parchment," we take more care, beat up high quality rags, and turn out a superior writing surface, durable, of excellent texture, and fit for finest fin-est needs; or, some colleges actually skin a sheep, and hand us a true "parch-ment" along with our gown and miter. Was ever a dictionary and small text more interesting? inter-esting? What fools we are to waste time on twaddly fiction fic-tion when actual truth is a hundredfold more fascinating. fas-cinating. Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, then continental continen-tal Europe with French and English, and we get a word which started 280 B. C., and with only a minimum mini-mum of structural change. So now, when I use the word "parchment" it is rich with a historical meaning mean-ing I never before dreamed. I read with much pleasure the book review in the Readers' Digest, "O Pioneers," written by an Englishman, to whom, what he saw was fresh, and hence vivid, though worn and trite for us. He has a remarkably fine choice of words, and great lucidity in properly using them. He gives his impressions of a tour of America, of course, mainly to our production pro-duction centers; two scenes with farmers are very refreshing. What we are used to we think nothing of; but to him, their newness brought them out into the limelight, lime-light, and his comments are very revealing. English use of English differ much from American use of them; but he could say "War is goddam stupid." |